News: Well, that's one way to stamp out "corruption"...

If you've been following world trade, you know China's come under fire for the quality and safety of its food and drug exports. It's not surprising, really - go to Beijing and tell me how many days you can see a clear blue sky. There's always that painful period in a country's development, it seems, where public health takes a nosedive in the service of bigger and faster production.

What's really interesting, though, is how China remedies the problem. Now, I'm all for holding government officials responsible for any criminal actions they take, but combine that sensibility with the death penalty and you have a whole new can of worms. Executions like this smell like power struggles and political intrigue instead of justic - I wonder just how many Chinese officials take bribes like this.

I used to approve of capital punishment, but it's very difficult nowadays for me to validate the state's power of life or death over any individual, even a murderer. This point is hammered home especially hard after looking at some of the cases that have through our criminal justice system. There's a reason criminal defendants call public defenders "dump trucks"...